welcome! jeremy freese is a professor in sociology at northwestern university. he finds blogging to be a good diversion from insomnia and a far better use of time than television.

Monday, January 08, 2007

of course, it would probably just get stolen by the people who run the zombie restaurant down the street

The other day I provided an example of how not to recruit people around Harvard for a project. Here, however, I present what seems to me like a positive example for Harvard recruitment. There are all kinds of posters around here offering you money for clinical trials. I haven't seen another one offer you a picture of your brain along with money, though. Moreover, Harvard seems just the kind of place where you have people who are not easily motivated by modest recruitment fees but might think A picture of my brain? How cool is that!. And, it's not like you can just step into a brain-photo booth at the mall and snag one.

Okay, so I confess: While I have a complicated travel schedule coming up--not to mention numerous work deadlines--I do fit the gender, age, handedness*, and language requirements, so I might call and see if they are still looking for people. A picture of your brain! I mean: A picture of my brain? How cool is that! If I do, I'll let you know what happens.

* If you didn't know this, (virtually?) everything you've ever seen reported in the press about neuoscience findings from fMRI studies has been based on samples of right-handed people only, as southpaw brain structures are different and the samples of these studies are so small as to not make subgroup analysis feasible. Plus, who cares about lefties qua lefties?

I did this in grad school since a friend of mine was doing a dissertation where you got to get a picture of your brain and I thought that was a small price to pay to help a friend in need.;) I have no idea where these pictures are at this point, if they even exist. They must've gotten lost in the shuffle of moving. Or they're in one of the boxes that I never unpacked. The idea of these pictures was cool, but in the end I don't know if I found them that interesting (which probably explains why I lost track of them). However, I find pictures of my sinuses (or sinus areas) fascinating.

Given that the latter doesn't seem to be an option in your case (and you probably don't have the sinus problems to make it an interesting endeavor anyway), I recommend going for it.